It has always been known, because inherent in its genesis, that Comme des Garçons is not a brand from which to expect simplicity or minimalism. Within a deliberately experimental imaginary, where fashion becomes artistic expression and the female body a mutable, redefinable and transformable form, Rei Kawakubo brings exactly this vision to the runway.
The theatricality is also immediately stated by the soundtrack: piano and strings accompany the models’ steps with a slow, nostalgic rhythm, building a dramatic atmosphere suspended in time. A musical delicacy that introduces a tinge of slight romanticism, contrasting with the radicalness of the forms on the catwalk.
Indeed, at eighty-three years old, Kawakubo continues to move with rare creative freedom. The Japanese designer’s Fall 2026 collection is built on a radical formal language. The palette is basic but violent: black and shocking pink. The clothes wrap the body in deliberately exaggerated and often indecipherable shapes. Volume does not follow the logic of anatomy: it emerges in sudden protuberances – on the shoulders, at the hips, at the base of skirts – through flounces and structures that alter the silhouette until it is almost unrecognizable.
In shocking pink these deformations take on an almost organic quality, while in black they become true sculptural constructions. Stiff, bulging skirts, monumental knots that seem to turn into autonomous presences along the lengths: elements that move the dress from the territory of the garment to that of the object.
As is often the case in Kawakubo’s work, the garments are not designed to enhance the body or to serve a practical function. They are autonomous entities, objects that seem to live a life of their own, deliberately extracted from any everyday or realistic dimension and thought of as sculptures or exercises in formal experimentation.
It is an imaginary that follows very precise internal logics. In this sense, in terms of aesthetic force and visionary coherence, one can draw parallels with Rick Owens: creative universes that are different from each other but so defined that they function almost as closed systems, translations of a very precise vision and aesthetic world to which one adheres, or not, with a kind of devotion.
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